With a majority of U.S.-based PC users favoring the notebook over the desktop PC, what are the new challenges facing IT Managers?  What are the biggest challenges caused by mobile computing?

Notebook PCs present a number of key advantages such as mobility and flexibility of work environment, as well as near desktop performance at near parity on cost over stationary desktop PCs.  However, many of the age-old PC management challenges become magnified with notebooks.  For example, applying patches and updates is a much more daunting proposition since notebooks are generally not persistently connected to the corporate network where they can be serviced off-hours.  Patching can take longer and becomes a disruption to the end-user, especially when patches fail.  There often isn’t an ability to do a desk-side visit, and when patches go wrong little can be done today to remotely roll back to a working system state.

Notebooks also present a number of new challenges to IT teams.  They are subjected to more wear and tear than desktops, resulting in more frequent need to troubleshoot, rebuild, and replace systems.  This can be a time consuming exercise for IT teams, and often they are only able to recover a user back to a standard starting point where all user personalization has been lost.  Also, because notebook users may have a legitimate need to add special software to accommodate home office or hotel peripherals and applications, IT is faced with non-standard system configuration.  This makes remote troubleshooting more difficult and also opens the door for the employee (or even family members like children) to install applications that compromise the stability and security of the system.

Lastly, notebooks are more likely than desktops to be lost or stolen.  Most organizations do not have sound data backup or encryption solutions in place for notebook PCs.  There have been many well-publicized cases of notebooks containing sensitive corporate information being misplaced or stolen.  Even in the rare cases where there is not sensitive data, it still represents a loss of productivity for the end-user when a notebook is lost or stolen.

How will IT Managers change their approach to PC management?

IT Managers have begun to find that the same virtualization technologies that have revolutionized the way IT data centers are managed can improve the manageability, reliability and security of desktop operating system environments.  Right now, most desktop management is done using software agents within the operating system.  This approach has reached its limit in terms of both functionality and usability.  In fact, in today’s environment, management agents often compete with each other--and the end-user--for the attention of the operating system.  They also offer little, if any, recoverability when a software distribution or patch fails or something else goes wrong that limits the ability for an end-user to access their system.  This becomes a much bigger issue when a larger portion of the workforce is mobile.  Virtualization addresses the shortcomings of management agents by performing key management functions much more elegantly and efficiently from outside the operating system.  The next generation PC management platform based on bare metal hypervisor technology uniquely solves the problem for managing and securing growing populations of loosely connected mobile workers. 

How does NxTop, Virtual Computer’s response to these management challenges, address the challenges of mobile computing?

Virtual Computer’s NxTop PC management platform makes it as easy to manage thousands of PCs as it is to manage one.  NxTop is an end-to-end solution for centrally creating and maintaining virtual desktops on a one-to-many basis while allowing them to execute in a distributed, disconnected fashion directly on “bare metal” PC hardware.  NxTop consists of two components, a central management server called NxTop Center and a client-side bare metal hypervisor and management/control plane called NxTop Engine.  We like to think of this as the iTunes and iPod of IT desktop management.  The IT Manager uses NxTop Center to centrally create virtual machines and publish them to users or groups of users.  NxTop Engine runs directly on a notebook PC, communicates with NxTop Center whenever connected to a network, and downloads virtual desktop environments.  These virtual machines, which can be based on Windows XP, Windows Vista or Linux, can run directly on NxTop Engine with no requirements for a traditional operating system to be installed.  A typical user may run a single Windows-based virtual machine, in which case their experience is identical to a typical Windows PC.  Power users can run multiple virtual machines on the notebook PC concurrently.  This comes in handy in cases where Window XP and Windows Vista need to run side by side to accommodate legacy applications not yet capable of running on Vista.  It is also ideal for the growing number of companies supporting employee-owned notebooks.  It allows them to run a corporate operating system and a personal operating system side-by-side with true security and isolation.  There are countless other powerful use cases.

When time comes for an IT Manager to apply a patch to the desktop operating system, they need only apply the patch to the master virtual machine running on NxTop Center.  Once the patch is applied, NxTop Center seamlessly publishes the blocks of data that have changed to all NxTop Engines subscribed to that virtual machine.  The next time the end-user reboots their operating system, the patch has been automatically integrated based on the master image but all of the individual user’s customizations and data remain untouched.  The same virtual hard disk technology also takes snapshots of the user data on the PC and sends it back to NxTop Center for backup purposes.  In addition, NxTop has a layered security framework that includes a trusted boot process, disk encryption, policy-driven data leakage protection and remote device kill.

The net result for IT is that activities that are very complicated or even impossible today--like securing data on a lost or stolen laptop or reprovisioning a user from one brand of notebook PC to another--become simply a click of a button.

What technology did NxTop utilize to deliver this method of notebook management, desktop management and end-user benefits?

Our most significant technology innovation is our patent pending approach for isolating the four main components of the PC: hardware, operating system, applications and user data.  Allowing each of these components to be managed independently is what enables us to give IT Managers scalable one-to-many desktop management without taking the “personal” out of personal computers the way that other desktop virtualization products have.

NxTop combines a variety of best-of-breed virtualization technologies including the Xen open source hypervisor.  We have optimized Xen to evolve from a server hypervisor to a client hypervisor and also wrapped a proprietary management/control plane around it, which communicates with NxTop Center and performs the various operating system servicing functions that would traditionally have been done much less effectively by software agents in Windows. 

NxTop Center is a rich, Web-based user interface that leverages the latest interactive Web technologies such as Ajax.  While the NxTop Engine hypervisor is based on Xen, we made significant efforts to maintain full two-way compatibility with Microsoft virtualization technologies.  We have adopted the same Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format for our virtual machines for Microsoft users and ensured that virtual machines created using Microsoft Virtual Server, Hyper-V and Virtual PC can run on NxTop Engine.

What makes NxTop superior to other products of similar function?

The one-to-many management paradigm described above is the breakthrough.  We can demonstrate today the ability to manage a thousand PCs is just as easy as it is to manage one.  Our most significant technology innovation is our patent pending approach for isolating the four main components of the PC: hardware, operating system, applications and user data.

Another key point of differentiation is that we support disconnected operation of virtual machines on notebook PCs.  To date, most virtual desktops run on a server and are accessed by the end-user using thin client that must be connected to a network to operate.  While that model may be fine for desktop environments, it does not work well for a notebook user, especially one who travels.  With more than half of corporate PCs sold today being notebooks, there is clearly a gap in the marketplace.

Finally, unlike first generation client virtualization solutions (such as VMware’s Assured Computing Environment (ACE) product) that have used a type 2 hypervisor to deliver a remotely managed desktop, NxTop is built from the ground up to run on bare metal.  Type 2 hypervisors suffer from a couple of problems which makes them unsuitable for PC Lifecycle Management.  First, they require a second operating system in order to run the managed desktop.  This is both an additional expense in terms of license fees, but that OS needs to be managed as well.  Second, the environment is not secure.  Because the virtual machine running on a type 2 hypervisor is relying on a second, untrusted operating system, there is increased risk that malware such as keystroke loggers or rootkits in the host will compromise the corporate virtual machine.  In contrast, NxTop Engine uses a type 1 (“bare metal”) hypervisor that allows us to provide a trusted platform for virtual machines to execute on the notebook without a host operating system.

Are there any other products or services that you would like to tell our readers about?

At this point, we have a singular focus on delivering the next generation desktop (or NxTop) which solves the problem of PC Lifecycle Management.  This is a complex task and you should look to us to make significant announcements across the spectrum of components that comprise this category of solutions.  Today we are starting with patching, backup and recovery, trusted boot, cryptographic disks, virtualized applications and granular policy control.  This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the capabilities of our solution.

What are Virtual Computer’s plans for the future?  Are you undertaking any Green IT initiatives at Virtual Computer?

Our plans are to get NxTop into the hands of as many users as possible, to help solve PC Management issues that have plagued organizations for decades.  People get very excited when we explain NxTop’s capabilities, and when they see it in action a light bulb seems to click on.  We are going to be aggressive with our pricing model and ensure that we have the necessary flexibility in our licensing models to make the barriers for trying the product very low.

There are significant Green IT benefits to using NxTop.  The NxTop model provides for centralized management and distributed execution.  NxTop Center has an extremely small data center footprint, even as the number of users grows, since the virtual machines run directly on PC devices and not on more expensive server hardware that runs inside the data center.

While there is great momentum in centralized computing solutions (often called VDI for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), that model should not be considered green.  More servers in the data center means more power, more cooling, sophisticated battery backup systems, redundant machines and redundant sites that combine to increase energy consumption, contrasted with a notebook/laptop solution based on NxTop.

To find out more about Virtual Computer and NxTop, visit www.virtualcomputer.com.

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